The last few weeks have been challenging for our community, as we come together to try to heal from the violence that left six young, innocent victims dead, with more injured.

It has been a month of vigils and memorials, a month full of graduations and remembrances, and a month full of questions as we look toward the future.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve met with parents of victims. I’ve sat down with law enforcement officials and mental health professionals to discuss what happened. I had coffee with UCSB students and community members in Isla Vista to hear their thoughts.

And through it all, I have heard two things — frustration and a demand for action.

Unfortunately, in that same period of time, there have been three more high-profile shootings added to the list of communities affected by gun violence.

Our friends and neighbors in Seattle, in Portland, and in Las Vegas have all witnessed gun violence in their own communities since May 23 — all within the month after the incident in our backyard.

That is not acceptable.

In Washington, we have held moments of silence and passed resolutions on the House floor, important steps to remember the victims of these senseless tragedies, and to condemn this violence. But enough is enough. I am tired of moments of silence; we’ve had too many. It is time to act.

Last week I attended a lunch with my former colleague Gabby Giffords, herself a victim of gun violence, and her group Americans for Responsible Solutions. I was joined by White House officials, advocates, and several of my colleagues to discuss how we, as women, can lead the fight to prevent and reduce gun deaths and injuries.

How do we fill the gaps in our laws and systems to address not only the type of gun violence we saw in Isla Vista, but the kind that’s happening day in and day out across the country? Knowing that suicide is a large component of our nation’s gun violence problem, how do we give families another tool in the toolbox if they believe a relative could be harmful to others or themselves?

When examining these difficult questions, I, in concert with my California Senate colleagues Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, wrote the Pause for Safety Act. This important bill would allow families to seek a gun violence prevention order if someone close to them poses a threat to himself, herself, or others. It would also ensure that law enforcement makes full use of all existing state and local gun databases when assessing a tip, warning, or request from a concerned family member or close associate.

There were clear red flags before the Isla Vista rampage. That means we need to make sure our families and law enforcement have the tools to intervene when someone is in crisis.

We also need to address our underfunded and often fractured mental health system, which is why I have joined my colleague from Napa, Representative Mike Thompson, as an original cosponsor of his bill, the Promoting Healthy Minds for Safer Communities Act.

This bill would strengthen our mental health system and improve mental health intervention efforts, help keep guns away from those who should not have them, provide tools to better understand mental illness and the gun violence epidemic, and ensure a fair restoration process of firearm ownership rights.

And while these two bills will address some of the most news-grabbing headlines, we also need to do more to address the violence that doesn’t always make national news but happens on a regular basis — often at the hands of an intimate partner.

When it comes to gun violence, the most dangerous place for a woman in the developed world is the United States, where women are 11 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than women in any other developed countries. And more than three times as many women are murdered by guns used by their intimate partners than are murdered by strangers using a gun, knife, or any other weapon combined.

That is why, last week, I introduced the Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act, a bill that would close several loopholes that exist in current federal protections against gun violence for those experiencing domestic violence or stalking.

Closing these loopholes will help protect millions of women and save lives.

Our laws must recognize that an abusive ex-boyfriend with a gun is just as deadly as an abusive ex-husband with a gun.

And our laws must recognize that an abuser under an emergency temporary restraining order is just as dangerous — if not more dangerous — than an abuser under a permanent restraining order. This will protect victims when they are most at risk — when a domestic abuser first learns his victim has left him and is ending the relationship.

And our laws must stop treating stalking convictions differently than other domestic violence crimes. This bill would close these unacceptable loopholes, protecting women when they are most at risk, while ensuring due process for the abuser.

Gun safety and the Second Amendment are not mutually exclusive, and the two can coexist. But we must take action so that everyone from the students in Isla Vista to neighbors at a movie theater in Aurora can walk the streets in peace. Action so that children and college students can learn in educational environments without sitting in fear, and so that men and women who seek help from an abuser can be protected.

We must not allow these tragedies to beget yet more tragedies followed by more moments of silence, and then inaction. We must act now.

Comments

Disagree: Stop making this a gender issue. Men are more likely to be murdered than women. What stops an abusive ex-boyfriend who is intent on killing his ex is when the ex has a gun.

Also, are we going down a slippery slope in the definition of "mental illness"? What is "mental illness"? Is it someone who is clearly violent and shouldn't even be out among the general public? Or anyone arbitrarily defined as crazy?

What is offensive about all this is that it's only when it's "one of us" (my quotation marks for effect) that the politicians run to the cameras. Black and Hispanic folks get killed all the time in the inner cities, but Capps (and the other "not one more" people) only care now that a small taste of that violence has spilled out into their back yard.

This is a particularly vacuous statement, even by Capp's diminished standards. It's kind of sickening that in light of the absolute tragedy of IV politico's like Lois cannot stop pushing their own agenda- "Protecting Domestic Violence and Stalking Victims Act" ? IV was about mental illness and killing men and women with knives and guns. No amount of money will make it easier to take away the constitutional rights of someone with some degree of mental illness.

These are the guns Lois Capps should concern herself with right now — those she voted for [ https://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote... ], currently being used by vicious eastern European Nazis to commit genocide against the civilian populations of southeast Ukraine:

One of the most corrupt members of the US Congress and a hypocrite with her own concealed carry permit and surrounded by armed guards nearly everywhere she goes, (and thought to be suffering from hoplophobia [ http://www.gunlaws.com/Hoplophobia-Gu... ], as a result of having discovered Harvey Milk's body), Dianne Feinstein has a long and putrid record as an enemy of civil liberties, transparency and accountability.

Among an immense amount of rubbish coming from Feinstein recently, she suggested that all US veterans have PTSD and should have their Second Amendment rights stripped, with no due process [ http://www.infowars.com/feinstein-all... ].

(For those under the impression that where information happens to appear is paramount to determining its credibility: yes, the link above is to Alex Jones' InfoWars, which links to the CSPAN video that includes Feinstein's remarks demonizing all US military veterans. )

#1 Keep guns away from those on prescription psychotropic drugs by whatever means necessary.#2 Severe punishment for those who cannot safely keep their guns. #3 If the only thing that stops guns is guns, why is that not working? The gun pros need to come up with a better idea/argument.

#1: For what it's worth, in my opinion there is much merit to this point, though I'd add (and have, about 3/5 down the page here and elsewhere: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/S... ) that these drugs ("psychotropic" is a good descriptor, though I prefer "neurotoxic") are manufactured and distributed mostly by transnational criminal corporations (see #3 below) and, in most cases, shouldn't be consumed at all.

#2: I also agree with this point — and let's not let the oligarch Michael Bloomberg (with his 17 hand-picked full-time armed guards poached from the NYPD after NYC taxpayers paid tens of thousands of dollars for their training) and his new astroturf "mom" groups hijack the term "gun safety":

Regarding #3: ("If the only thing that stops guns is guns, why is that not working?")

It does work.

One of the most fundamental deceptions perpetrated by the citizen disarmament movement is to *completely ignore* defensive gun use statistics. There is some dispute over various studies (and I've not had the time to sort out the conflicting claims, which I'd like to), but studies indicate that the good from firearms in the hands of 100 million US law-abiding and responsible citizens outweighs the harm by a ratio of *from 27 - 80 to 1* — and in over 90% of these defensive incidents, a gun is not even fired.

"According to the National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists in 1994, the rate of defensive gun uses can be projected nationwide to approximately 2.5 million per year — one defensive gun use every 13 seconds."

SOURCE: The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law

But, other than an occasional local TV news report or mention in a local printed newspaper, it is not in the interest of NYTWaPoNPRHuffPostMSNBCCNNABCCBSPBS, now controlled by just six transnational corporations [ http://ftmdaily.com/global-issues/cor... ], to report these incidents of successful citizen defense against criminals.

It is also not in the interest of politicians, even those who are not extraordinarily ignorant of these issues(or clearly working on behalf of the elite, such as Dianne Feinstein), to go after the transnational pharmaceutical corporations, for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately, "if it bleeds, it leads." With combined annual profits of $35.9 billion — more than the profits for all the remaining 490 Fortune 500 businesses — the top ten transnational pharmaceutical corporations, up to 80% of which, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, are criminal organizations [ http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/... ], both manufacture and distribute one of the primary *causes* (i.e. not simply the *tools* used) of the tragic and emotional mass shootings, as well as many other gun crimes.

To maximize its advertising revenue, the corporate media manipulates and lies about statistics, and also, like the citizen disarmament movement (that works from an 80-page propaganda manual instructing it to focus on emotions, rather than facts) hypes *all gun crimes*, particularly mass shootings, 24/7, deliberately encouraging copycat tragedies, so as to vacuum up even more advertising revenue, as they rattle on incessantly, glorifying the shooter while demonizing the inanimate objects chosen as the weapons, but ignoring the actual cause of nearly all of the mass shootings — those extremely dangerous neurotoxins peddled by its pharmaceutical corporate sponsors.

I stand corrected, JT. I now own the one .22 rifle my father gave me but have no bullets, and haven't used it since age 12 long ago.See, it's the extraordinary lethality of these automatic weapons, menacing killing-tools never envisioned by the F. Fathers, and human nature and mental instabilities and raging economic equalities... too easy to "go postal" thus, within reason, gotta whittle the 2 Amend. rights down as much as possible, & Lois's gun restraining order is positive.

DavyBrown wrote:"...it's the extraordinary lethality of these automatic weapons..."

Automatic weapons (of which AR-15s and similar — owned by 4 million or more law-abiding US citizens — are not) have been banned since 1934.

Such firearms, which cost $15,000 or more, with very few exceptions, are only availaable for law enforcement, who must undergo extensive, expensive, and time-consuming background checks.

So the current use of the term 'assault weapon' is most often a deliberately provocative and pejorative term that does absolutely nothing to further classify 'weapon' and is used to scare nearly witless those not knowledgeable about firearms. Regarding 'military style', a term also wildly tossed around: it requires zero understanding of firearms to understand the absurdity of limiting or banning something because of its 'style.' More on 'style' below.

Illustrating with an image, DavyBrown's example of a .22 rifle:

If one were to click on the link below, and view the bottom two images only: this is the *exact same firearm*, the left with a wood stock, the right with a modern black plastic composite stock and some accessories, none of which increase the firepower:

It's a simple .22 rifle, the type of rifle that, prior to all the hyperbolic screeching about evil guns, 12-year olds utilized to learn marksmanship in summer camp for decades.

Yet those with no knowledge of firearms would likely recoil in fear at the bottom right version.

Setting aside the concept of *need* often incorrectly claimed to be relevant by the oligarchs and elite politicians with zero respect for fundamental *rights*, AR-15 (the initials indicate the manufacturer, incidentally, not 'assault rifle') and similar are simply modern rifles, semi-automatic, as are, I believe, approximately 80% of rifles in circulation.

Regarding the accessories that have been added to the version illustrated at the bottom right of the link above: *none increase the firepower*; the utility of the scope, bipod stand, hand grip, and higher capacity magazine ( incidentally, here's a 2-minute PSA regarding magazine restrictions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature... ) for sport shooting enthusiasts should be obvious.

The collapsible stock makes it easy for the firearm to be adjusted to be ideal for any body size and, to be shared, for instance, between husband and wife sport shooting enthusiasts. Despite claims that this particular rifle is "not needed for hunting" (and, again, setting aside the irrelevance of elite and ignorant politicians determining what citizens *need*), hunters appreciate modern rifles with plastic composite rather than wood stocks (fitted for hunting, rather than, as is the image linked above, fitted for sport shooting), as they are much lighter for carrying around in the woods for hours.

( Knowing that suicide is a large component of our nation’s gun violence problem, how do we give families another tool in the toolbox if they believe a relative could be harmful to others or themselves?)

While staying the summer in North Idaho... I learned that this area ranks very high in the number in suicides...(25 per 100,000 / 67% above the national average!)I ask a few law enforcement officers is this was related to the high percentage of gun ownership. They're reply was a definite no! Fact is... Most suicides were not by a bullet. (Hangings, Over dosing on prescription pills and carbon monoxide poisoning...)Fact is, when someone becomes suicidal or talks about offing themselves, the first thought of those around them is take away their guns...

Seems to me, the anti gun nuts want to relate anything bad to the evil NRA members on the other side of the aisle...Yet, when it comes to cleaning up any problems they have around the world, they can't recruit enough of them to die for their cause!

Where's the military fit in when it comes to suicide?The Congresswoman hired a vet who claims his PTSD led to death of an innocent person. He will also suffer for the rest of his life.A background check is considered "an effective tool in the tool box", Why did the Congresswoman not think about using it?(Perhaps because it didn't fit in her politically correct portfolio!)

Education about suicides and the role of firearms is the most important piece of this puzzle. Yet here we are listening to a member of Congress prattle on about her political homies and "the suffering" of Santa Barbara's college students... Enough Already!

"The measure was immediately and viciously opposed by the gun rights group California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees (CAL-FFL), which called the bill “a wanton violation of nearly every guarantee of liberty contained in the Bill of Rights.”..."

after quoting me, JT, your third sentence begins "So the current use of the term 'assault weapon' ..." SEEMED like it was connected to your DB reference.. and your response is easily the longest of the 24 comments here so far.

Gun fanatics like to talk a lot about safety, accountability and responsible gun ownership, but won't ever suggest that those things should come before the ownership part. Heck, they already whine like a bunch of little toddlers about having to take a handgun safety course that amounts to little more than a checkbox card.

DavyBrown wrote:"...after quoting me, JT, your third sentence begins "So the current use of the term 'assault weapon' ..." SEEMED like it was connected to your DB reference."

Fine; I can agree that it may have *seemed* that way.

DavyBrown wrote: "...and your response is easily the longest of the 24 comments here so far..."

Very occasionally, as other participants in these discussions do, I post a 2-part comment — but, like the comment you refer to, more than 95% of my comments conform to the 3000-character limit.

Regardless of that limit, I wonder why you consider the length of my comments noteworthy. If you think the 3000-character limit is inappropriate, perhaps you should contact the Santa Barbara Independent.

I have no objection to being trained to use a gun safely.What I do object to is anti-gun hoplophobes telling me I have to be certified before I can own one.Should we have a law that says you need to be able to read before you can buy a newspaper?How about a certain IQ before you can vote?

Think before you post good sir. I might also add that calling people names doesn't make your point any more clear.

Two things happen when people are afraid of gun violence: They stay away from inner city ghettos and failing that, they arm themselves.

Because government is not going to do anything about the primary perpetrators of gun violence, they firguratively "arm" lone nuts who then figuratively "kill" innocents which then justifies laws that disarm, diagnose, and medicate or incarcerate white people. Even if Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and Elliot Rodger were authentic madmen their puported actions were flukes - unpredictable and unpreventable despite the political rhetoric they generate.

I would argue that just because people wisely stay away from areas afflicted with (gun) violence does not mean we as a nation are that uncompassionate not to care. How many murders everyday in the US? It is not reasonable to expect each person to know who died where and how for every death in the US. It's not that the population as a whole doesn't care, the population as a whole, rich, poor, whichever color etc have their individual lives: work, joys, horrors.I.e. their own lives to lead. This is why we have government independent organizations to keep track of such statistics then hopefully get the word out so action can be taken. Kill one person or twelve I know you agree is bad dewdly, so as crass and ignorant and closeminded as many Indy bloggers err I mean Americans :) are, at the heart I think we are all still a nation of good people who care for their neighbors and fellow Americans and world citizens. We only hear the bad because that's what is the anomaly in our everyday lives.

Three people died tragically from a lack of knife control laws. There are only 2 of those in California - so we obviously need to pass another 39 so that knives and guns will have the same number of laws (41) against/regulating them.

Then we can pass law #42 and #43, which is to allow family members to place restraining orders on knives and guns.

Finally: no one will hurt anyone any more.Wow - if I only knew how wise and effective Ms. Capps' ideas were I could have felt so much better about myself while more people died after I passed ineffective, meaningless regulations that harm legal knife owners.

When I say that the people of Isla Vista are not "worried" about gun violence I mean they are not afraid of being shot during a "rampage". It has nothing to do with "compassion" - they don't think about the daily gun violence of our inner cities except to stay the hell away.

I would be surprised if any parents took their kids out of UCSB because of Elliot Rodger, but parents would think twice about sending their kids to the University of Chicago because Hyde Park is right next to the black neighborhood with the highest murder rate in Illinois.

Again I beg to differ, everyone is afraid of being shot in a rampage. People in IV were before Rodgers and more so afterwards. Rodgers isn't the first lunatic to target UCSB/IV, there've been many others.

What is the indication that people in Isla Vista are afraid of being shot? After the Rodger event everything was back to normal within twenty-four hours. No one pulled their kids out of school, businesses didn't close, there were no bullet-proof vests or barricaded windows. No curfew. No fewer cars or bikes. Aside from pro forma flower displays and the press it appeared that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

All these people who feel safe in Isla Vista would not feel safe in downtown Detroit, Washington Park in Chicago, or Newark.